For awhile I was really obsessed with Milne's short adult fiction, and this is the book that started it all. I found it in the attic of a book store on Market St. in Corning, NY, and I've read it multiple times. Milne's humor and acuity into human nature shine in these vignettes, perhaps even more so than in his Pooh stories. ( )

A A Milne became a household figure following the publication of Winnie-the-Pooh in 1926, but he had been writing novels, poetry, plays and poetry from 1917 onwards and before that he had been a journalist and humorist making regular contributions to Punch Magazine, which in 1914 was a weekly publication. The Magazine had been launched in 1841 and had become the most successful humorous and satirical magazine of it’s time, famous for it’s cartoons. This book is a collection of short stories comedy sketches and vignettes that A A Milne contributed to the magazine, published in book form in 1914.

The humour is very British and features mostly characters from the upper classes who seem not to have a care in the world, but have gentle fun poked at them rather in the way that we associate with P G Wodehouse. A whole collection of these sketches is a little too much, but I found some of them quite amusing, here is an opening paragraph from one of the stories:

“WHEN nice people ask me to their houses for the week-end, I reply that I shall be delighted to come, but that pressure of work will prevent my staying beyond Tuesday. Sometimes, in spite of this, they try to kick me out on the Monday; and if I find that they are serious about it I may possibly consent to go by an evening train. In any case, it always seems to me a pity to have to leave a house just as you are beginning to know your way to the bathroom.”

Gentle fun, well written with an undercurrent of satire: much of the satire is aimed at upper class men who glide through life, seemingly doing as little as possible, relying on wives, secretaries and servants to take up all of the slack. Reading this collection you would hardly think that Britain was on the verge of entering the first world war, until you come upon one story about the attempt to uncover a possible German spy who is working as a hairdresser in Hull: his house is broken into by a couple of amateur sleuths who steal a suspicious document from him, which turns out to be a shopping list connected with his business. Thats as near to a sense of the war in England that you get, however in the cartoons from Punch magazines of that year, they are dominated with issues concerning the war.

The working classes of course hardly existed for Punch magazine and its readers and when they do make an entrance they are not shown in a good light here is an example:

He had just flashed past a labourer in the road—known to his cronies as the Flap-eared Denizen of the Turnip-patch—a labourer who in the dear dead days of Queen Victoria would have touched his hat humbly, but who now, in this horrible age of attempts to level all class distinctions, actually went on lighting his pipe! Alas, that the respectful deference of the poor toward the rich is now a thing of the past!

Perhaps A A Milne was being ironic? - perhaps he wasn’t.

If you like P G Wodehouse you might like this. It made me smile occasionally and so three stars. ( )